Thumper VR Review

Thumper is one of those game that stays in your head long after you’ve put it down. It’s a horror game disguised as rhythm action, a high-speed trip through an abstract hell full of imaginative cosmic entities and set to the beat of a sinister orchestral score. Its surprisingly sophisticated one-button control scheme makes it invitingly accessible while still allowing for a ton of tricky, precision-based maneuvers, and it’s all executed with intense physical brutality and speed that adds an exhilarating violence to your every action.

Thumper manages to do a lot with very little input, making it both extremely easy to pick up and difficult to master. This is a tempting combination that demands replaying, in part because of how nuanced the rhythm-based gameplay becomes later on. The first level does a fine job introducing you to the most basic mechanics, which lay the groundwork for the gradually intensifying and increasingly interesting layers of obstacles that build up over each of its nine stages.

Using a DualShock 4, you tap X to make your little chrome space beetle press, or “thump,” glowing rectangles on the track, spaced out based on very specific beats to make them easier and more catchy to hit. Holding down X lets you speed through dangerous red bars unscathed, which make a satisfying clunk as you barrel into them, while holding X and using the left analog stick to hold left or right lets you survive turns. Both obstacles make a distinct sound shortly before they appear, giving you some much-needed forewarning. The fact that obstacles sometimes show up so last-second makes each course that much more thrilling, but the sound cues keep it fair.

In many ways, Thumper is basically a horror game.

Missing turns or crashing into obvious obstacles like the red bars shatter the protective outer shell of your beetle in a loud, violent storm of flying metal that often clutters up the screen, making it difficult to see what’s coming next. Two hits and you’re dead, but with the frequency of checkpoints in each level, this is a generous amount of health. While it didn’t happen often, there were times when I was going so fast and the track gave such little indication of upcoming obstacles that getting hit once doomed me into an inevitable second crash because of the on-screen distraction. This was annoying when it happened, but I can’t deny the exhilaration of Thumper’s devastating physical brutality — a quality that is, however, portrayed much more reasonably in its jarring last-second turns, or the pounding shockwaves you can learn to send out for bonus points.

Thumper has many of these nuanced mechanics, which make its simple one-button approach much more sophisticated than you’d think at a glance. For turns, you can hold X as far ahead of the bend as you want to, but holding left or right with the analog stick at just the right moment earns you extra points for a “perfect turn.” While taking turns in mid-air will break your flight, nailing a perfect turn keeps you in the air and lets you collect otherwise-impossible rings. The list goes on and on.

Thumper emulates the satisfaction of playing a musical instrument.

You don’t need to know most of this to complete the full game, which keeps Thumper accessible to players of all skill levels without requiring any adjustable difficulty settings. Doing the bare minimum of avoiding dangerous obstacles will get you through all nine levels just fine, but if you want to move up from the low C to a B, A, and finally S rank, you need to learn the nuances. This invites replayability, and even after running through several levels for the third or fourth time, I’m still finding small new ways to milk more points from each track. It’s nice to see my name climbing up the as-of-now scantily populated leaderboards, but the most rewarding part is the sheer satisfaction of executing each beat in a sequence and hearing the way my movements perfectly match the beat of the music.

As a rhythm game, Thumper is all about the music, but it’s the little reactive noises here and there that make up the bulk of its captivating audio experience. Everything in Thumper has smart sound cues that indicate whether you’ve done something right: a deep, bassy thump when you land beats, a bright creak when you bank a perfect turn, multiple clunks increasing in pitch with each red bar you destroy.

Sound cues become necessary to the beat in smart ways.

Once things really start ramping up past the tutorial-heavy first level and mechanics like jumping over spikes, flying to collect rings, and switching lanes are introduced (all also conveniently done with some easy combination of X and the left analog stick), these sound cues become more than just rewarding signals of a job well done — they become necessary to the beat. Against the musical backdrop of Thumper’s dramatic war drums, industrial noise, and orchestral wailings are the thumps and clunks and creaks of my actions, punctuating the score and adding a separate, but unifying melody. At its speediest and most intense peaks, I found that Thumper emulated the satisfaction of playing a musical instrument as I rapidly hit and held notes to the beat of its haunting music.

This level of intensity and precision culminates most strongly during Thumper’s many visually stunning and challenging boss fights. Most of the nine levels have one mini-boss and one recurring final boss, a burning red skull who grows gradually more horrifying and malformed with every appearance — and it’s huge in VR. In many ways, Thumper is basically a horror game.

Thumper's bosses represent the height of its bizarre imagery.

To fight bosses, you need to perfectly hit increasingly demanding sequences of glowing green thumps on the track, ending in one glowing thump that sends out a devastating wave of energy to attack the enemy. Missing one beat forces you to play through the sequence without the final “attack thump,” then resets the loop once it reaches the start so you can try again. Punishing you with repetition is actually a nice tradeoff because it lets you practice the sequence even when you mess up. Bosses go down in about four hits, but the difficulty of the sequences that couch each “attack thump” gets tougher and tougher with each level. Watching the boss finally explode in a flurry of flying bone, steel, and whatever else they’re made of is a fine reward for your efforts.

Thumper’s bosses also represent the height of its bizarre imagery, ranging from massive, cosmic geometric shapes that pulse to the beat of the music to sinister aquatic demons. The most frightening boss I went up against was an ethereal being that looked like a sinister cross between a jellyfish and a centipede. Its menacing size and eel-like movements dominated my field of view as it loomed overhead and stretched into the distance, making it one of the more terrifying monstrosities to witness in VR. I also fought a devilish starfish that seemed to be made out of galaxies, and — another favorite — an unsettlingly massive machine that sped along the track in front of me, whipping around curves with an uncanny agility and barreling impossible tunnels into thin air.

There's an otherworldly dread in Thumper's strange world.

The fusion of metallic materials like chrome and steel with the writhing organic tentacles that often adorn the track creates a techno-horror nightmare realm unlike anything I’ve ever seen. If I had to compare Thumper’s trippy holographic light tunnels and swirling backdrop to one thing, it would be the warp sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a bizarre, otherworldly dread in Thumper’s strange world, like you’ve reached the edge of the universe and are seeing things you shouldn’t be. The weight and mystery of that void is so much more apparent in VR, where you can freely look around at the billowing colors in the distance, or to the side at the eerie, synchronized thrashing of the limbs sprouting from the track.

There is a disappointing lack of visual variation to distinguish levels from each other beyond speed and mechanics, and sometimes sights, like the tentacles that surround the track or the interior of a sci-fi looking tunnel disappear too soon into your periphery. Considering how awesome and huge and weird everything looks in VR, it would’ve been nice to have the option to look back and see things disappear into the distance to create the illusion that I was surrounded by the abyss rather than just plummeting straight at it. But I rarely felt the need to scrutinize my surroundings beyond what I could take in during its high-speed action anyway, especially since the sights in front of you are always powerful enough as it is. Each level contains a few much-needed interludes, which provide a temporary respite from the breakneck action and gave me the chance to get a closer look at my unnatural surroundings without risking a crash.

The Verdict

Thumper’s brutal, breakneck speed and precision-based musical action kept me entranced for all nine of its bizarre, nightmarish stages, which contained enough nuanced high score-chasing tricks to demand several replays already. To really master Thumper’s many layers of rhythm-based mechanisms would take much more time than the 10 or so hours it takes to complete the first time – and that’s a challenge that I eagerly accept.
Menacing boss fights that manage to stay interesting despite a relatively linear structure and a strange, chrome-plated brand of cosmic horror that’s as fascinating as it is frightening make repeat trips easy and exciting. But it’s the music and sounds of Thumper that will stick with me the most, beckoning me back to that terrifying abyss for several more hours to come.